The Wretched (Crawl Home)
by TheScreamingViking
Summary: After Gaia is worn thin by all of Sephiroth's attempts on the planet's life, Tifa goes back in time to the Nibelheim incident to stop him. Her plan? Tell him the truth. Enemies to lovers, Angst with a happy ending, Time travel.
1. Chapter 1

It was so easy.

That was what stuck with Tifa afterwards, when she stepped out of the mansion into the grey Nibelheim afternoon, blinking after days in the dark basement. Two steps behind a dull-eyed Sephiroth. It had been so easy.

Misuse of Time Materia, pushing past a painfully young Zack to get into the mansion, then just talking. Days of it. She answered every question Sephiroth could think of, about himself, his mother, his father, Jenova, Shinra. She gave him nothing but the uncomfortable and unsatisfying truth.

"Why should I believe you?" he asked, bags under his eyes and his skin pale from the days underground.

"I will never lie to you," she replied. "I promise you that." She didn't have the energy for soothing untruths anymore.

That wasn't enough for him, so she woke up Vincent and he corroborated.

Of course, Sephiroth wanted to know who she was too and how she could possibly know these things. Why did she look so much like the mountain guide, why was she there telling all these things to him? What did she want? She told him that too.

She had expected to find some kind of healing in looking Sephiroth in the eye, two days before he would have burned Nibelheim to the ground, and telling him it didn't work. Jenova never got to sail the cosmos and all he could buy himself was a slow death in the life-stream. The self-righteous anger died in his eyes. She just felt tired.

She looked over the uneven rooftops of Nibelheim village. Smoke rose from chimneys in trailing wayward columns and the remains of the heavy dew the night before still darkened patches tiles.

"What are you going to do?" she asked.

"I… have to leave Shinra." He hung his head. "No. I'm going to dismantle Shinra. This is not… acceptable business practise."

Somewhere down in the village children shrieked and chased after a soccer ball. Just one conversation and… that was it. The world kept on turning.

"Good," she said. And it was. Planet, it stung.

Sephiroth looked at her. "What will you do?"

She sucked in a breath and shook her head.

"I wish you well, Sephiroth. I do," she said, and she almost meant it. She walked away.

* * *

Sephiroth did exactly as he said he would. He went back to Shinra, sat in front of the board and told them Shinra would no longer exist. They laughed, more out of startled confusion than humour, and then they stopped laughing. He didn't hurt any of them, much as he wanted to. Hojo had the gall to look at him with a wounded expression, as he ordered the lot of them to be imprisoned and the company broken up.

He had wondered how much of SOLDIER would follow him against the president's orders. The answer was a little disappointing. Why had he done as he was told for so long?

Brick by arduous brick he tore it all down. Years of power hoarding, much of which he himself had facilitated, slowly undone and redistributed. There were attempts to stop him. They didn't last very long.

Regional authorities who had sat in defanged silence for decades stepped forward to help, to claim their slice of the pie. He didn't care who was on top so long as it wasn't Shinra. Or himself, for that matter. Unfortunately, there was no way to force change without being heavily involved every step of the way. Genesis crawled back out of the woodwork with great claims of reconciliation and forgiveness.

Sephiroth thought about the pile of dead cells rotting in the Nibelheim reactor. Its lilting lies had soured.

By pure chance, he found the time traveller again.

He was walking through a Junon food festival, waiting to intercept the Turks. They were still vainly trying to smuggle resources out to Rufus, acting like Shinra still ran the world and nothing had changed. Like their lives weren't all collapsing in polite slow motion. He wished he'd sent Zack out to do it, but the boy's loyalties were… complicated, these days.

It ended in a tense stand-off, empty threats, and the eventual hand over of everything they had. Midway through a terse conversation with Tseng he caught sight of long black hair behind one of the stalls. She was watching with pursed lips, one of very few civilians unphased by the appearance of so many famously dangerous people.

The side street was deserted by the time the Turks cleared out. Forgotten plastic cups rolled in the evening breeze, collecting in the gutters in and catching on clumps of stained napkins.

Tifa stood behind a sponsored stall, wearing an apron and a cap with a logo on it, her arms crossed.

"What are you doing here?" he asked.

Was she following him? Unlikely. It would be a poor cover for someone following a mobile target. She looked like she'd been there for hours.

"Working," she replied tersely. "What are you doing?"

"The same."

She looked different out under the sky of a late evening than she did under the stagnant lights of a basement. The vicious edge of determination was missing from her gaze, or perhaps it just lost impact under a cap decorated with cartoon tonberries declaring Marvin's kitchen knives the sharpest in town.

"Can I get you a drink?" she asked after the silence had stretched too long.

It was ridiculous that she was even here, indistinguishable from any other normal worker.

"I'll have… whatever you're serving." He approached the stall.

She got to work, twisting the taps on tubs of punch and scooping chopped fruit. Her strong, scarred hands moved confidently through motions she had repeated hundreds of times that night alone. She carried herself like a combatant. Armoured gloves peeked out of her back pocket. Nothing remained of the timidity and false confidence of the young mountain guide.

Stiffly she pushed a paper cup stuffed with mint and fruit in front of him.

"That'll be three gil, please."

He reached for his wallet, committing to the absurd mundanity of it.

"I have 2.95."

She sighed.

The expected transaction completed, they stared each other down from opposite sides of the stall.

"You'd get better work if you moved to Midgar," he said.

"What do you want?" She crossed her arms again.

"I have questions."

"Alright. Ask."

He reached for something to ask. "The dissolution of Shinra, in your time. How did that work?"

She shook her head. "Nothing like this. Midgar was gone. And the whole world had a common enemy to unite against and blame Shinra for. Even if the city had survived… people were too angry."

People were angry. A very impersonal way of putting it, he thought, looking at the way her fingers tightened against her upper arms.

Shinra's executives looked at him with such vitriol. There was a deeper, more intimate hatred in her eyes. She knew all the havoc he was causing was nothing compared to what he could have done. Even Genesis didn't grasp the height of the cliff he had been teetering on, the terror he would have unleashed.

He looked into her eyes and found a kind of solace in the depths of hatred he saw there.

"You turned back time for this?" he drawled, gesturing at the stall, the dirty street.

"I gave up my future to get you back yours," she said, pulling herself up to her full height. "What else do you want?"

"You didn't do it for me. You hate me." He leaned forward and had the satisfaction of watching her stiffen. "You bought your town's future… at the price of mine."

Her eyes narrowed. Slowly she reached back for her gloves.

He smiled. He'd done nothing but play nice for weeks. He summoned his sword.

She had obviously fought him before, he thought, amid an explosion of shattering wooden supports and bursting tubs of punch. She was good. But no competition.

He looked down at her along his blade. She was breathing heavily, her back to a wall and her jaw clenched. He shook his head, confused. He had assumed she had the means to kill him if he hadn't seen reason.

She was only ever armed with words. Betting on the truth, against every lie he ever told himself.

"You said you beat me, in that future," he demanded. He too was angry.

"Not alone," she hissed. "I never faced you alone and won."

"You came back alone."

Her throated bobbed as she swallowed. Pools of red alcohol drained into the gutters at her feet.

"You still have your future, Sephiroth."

* * *

He went back to his work, shaken by the encounter. It lingered with him as he disbanded the army, as the western continent split itself up into some dozen-odd city-states. Some set up elections, others had powerful old family lines who simply assumed control. He gave them all control over their own Mako reactors and soon they were minting their own currencies and setting up borders. Costa del Sol annexed Corel in a bloody invasion. The recently founded Gold Saucer hired a bunch of newly unemployed Shinra MPs to take it back.

Sephiroth missed the stability of a world he took no responsibility for. He missed Angeal and Genesis and the little lies they maintained between them.

Genesis and Zack were on his side and technically helping, but he didn't trust either of them. He wasn't sure they understood why he was doing this. Some days he wasn't either.

He thought of Tifa's suddenly achingly sad expression when she looked up at him from the wrong end of Masamune, telling him he still had a future.

He tracked her down again. She was working in a bar this time, still in Junon. It surprised him, there was a distinctly Midgarian lilt to her mountain-country accent.

She was near dead on her feet at the tail end of what must have been a long night. He watched a cantankerous bar manager give her instructions on locking up and then leave her alone with the last few patrons of the night. Junon was suffering an increasing drinking problem, as were all Shinra founded cities in a post-Shinra world.

She poured him a bourbon because they were pretending he was here for the refreshments.

"How's destroying Shinra going?" she asked, dry as a bone.

"I imagined those who took its place would be better," he replied. He examined the light refracting through the amber liquid, then glanced up at her. "I don't know why. I've never had any faith in humanity."

She raised an eyebrow at him. "If you want me to punch you again, you'll have to wait until I've taken table three their drinks."

He smiled despite himself and took a sip. Table three held the only other remaining patrons: a group of stubbornly, desperately positive middle-aged women searching for reasons to justify their optimism at the bottom of every tequila shot. Tifa brought them a round of waters and their bill.

His bourbon was quite nice. Angeal would have informed him it was peaty.

It was just the two of them left by the time she came back to the bar, pulling up the grates under the beer taps and cleaning them out.

"Did you imprison Reeve?" she asked, not looking up from her task.

"He's under house arrest, in return for his ongoing co-operation. He's digging up the solar and wind power technology Shinra systematically buried."

She nodded along. "Wind turbines along the Midgar cliffs can power the city easily so long as you can stop ahrimans from nesting in them."

"We were intending to use solar power," he said.

"Not enough sunlight gets through the smog for it."

He frowned. "We haven't had that problem."

She paused in her work. "Maybe it was pollution kicked up by the meteor."

He wanted to ask how that other version of him had summoned such a large meteor in the first place. Just out of curiosity, because he couldn't figure it out. No comet materia came even close, mastered or otherwise. She continued washing down the bar mats with her lips pursed and her shoulders slightly hunched. What he assumed was her customer service face was fading away in place of the staunchly determined and unafraid expression she usually gave him. He wondered if it was reserved for him.

"You're an environmentalist," he said idly.

"Practically a requirement for joining Avalanche."

He sat up straighter. "You're an eco-terrorist?"

"We weren't like the earlier avalanche, um, Elfie and her group? We weren't working with Fuhito or anyone like that."

"Did you blow up reactors?" he drawled.

She snapped off the tap.

"Yes." She lifted her chin, daring him to criticise.

"So self-righteous," he said with a cutting smile.

"I never levelled a city," she said, leaning forward on the bar.

His smile dropped. "Neither have I."

"But you're curious, aren't you?" she spat. "You want to know how he did it."

His hand tightened around the glass. "Do you even know?"

"Yes, I do." She straightened. "And?"

He looked at her through narrowed eyes. The tension in her frame, how her hands resolutely didn't reach back for her gloves. Banked up furry in her eyes held back by fraying restraint.

"You're afraid… I might change my mind."

"What do you want from me?" she demanded. "Why are you here? You want to see how close you can push me to breaking? If you can outdo your other self and-" she sucked in a breath and retreated back into herself. "You can't. You won't."

He watched, still sitting quietly, holding a half-empty drink.

"I am sorry," he offered, eventually. "For what he-"

"Don't." She cut her reddened eyes at him. "You can't apologise for something someone else did."

"But you can hate me for it?"

Her gaze lowered. "I'm trying not to."

"You promised never to lie to me," he drawled.

"You're right. I promised." She leaned her against the bar with a sigh, giving him her back and staring at the floor. "I should forgive you. I shouldn't even be angry at you, it wasn't you, it wasn't even your fault. You did everything right."

"And yet?"

"I hate you because you're all I have left." She lowered her head and looked at him over her shoulder. "I don't want to let go of hating you."

He took a slow sip of his drink, emptying the glass. "If not for you… I could have slaughtered Shinra in a day and felt no regret. I could have destroyed this planet."

"You could have _tried_."

He scoffed. "You would not have come all this way to prevent something that already failed."

"You did fail. Again and again. We always stopped you, no matter the cost." She turned back to him, arms braced against the bar. "You kept trying, kept losing, but you didn't stop. Long after you knew you weren't going to win, you _kept trying._ You drove the planet to a slow death just because you couldn't have it."

She looked down at him. "Is that what you call a victory? Is that good enough for you, destroying yourself so long as it means taking your enemy with you too?"

"Why not?" he asked, his voice low. "It's good enough for you apparently."

"I'm not…" She blinked in surprise. "That's not what this is."

"Isn't it? Isn't that what your whole mission was, sacrificing yourself to neutralise me?"

"No, it wasn't." She hunched her shoulders.

"Then why are you here? Provoking me?" he asked, provoking her. He stood and she instinctively reached back to her gloves. He raised an eyebrow at her. "Do you need me to give you a reason to attack me, Tifa?"

She seethed for a moment, her lips pursed and her hand wavering.

Then she let out a breath with a light laugh and she shook her head.

"No. I'm not Cloud. Thanks all the same."

His browed lowered at that. "Strife? What does he have to do with this?"

Her eyes widened. She punched him.

It was a better fight than the first, for all her clear exhaustion.

She looked so plainly irritated with him by the time he slammed her against a table by the throat that he couldn't resist a laugh. She kicked him in the face for it. He probably deserved it.

* * *

Lance Corporal Strife wasn't very interesting. Whatever he had become evidently wouldn't come to pass anymore. Sephiroth could see no benefit to going after him now.

Tifa looked at him with more suspicion than normal the next time he tracked her down. Apparently waiting for whatever terrible fate he might visit upon her childhood friend. He watched sidelong as she picked up a rowdy patron and carried him to the door. She was in her thirties now, same as him, she had turned back the clock well over a decade. Strife may well have been more than a friend to her over the years.

She'd come back alone.

He felt a quiet and enduring vindication at that. She alone had come back for him.

Life marched on. Tifa lost her job for getting into a fight with a patron on-premises, for which he took no responsibility as she threw the first punch. Kalm seceded from Midgar and then changed its mind two months later.

The next time he found her she had somehow turned unemployment into a managerial role at a different hole in the wall pub. Whenever he felt like perhaps he had been too generous with humanity after all, he would find his way down to her. She never turned him away or offered him any comforting half-truths.

He wandered down the street her pub was on one chilly spring morning, not expecting to find her out and about. It looked different during the day. The grey ocean visible far below and a brisk morning wind blowing up to meet them. Decorative trees dotted the sidewalk and to his surprise, there was a row of school children lined up out the front.

Tifa and a couple of other women were handing out steaming bowls of food to children and then sending them off to wait by the nearby bus stop.

"Remember to bring the spoon back tomorrow," Tifa said, kneeling down in front of a tiny child wearing a worn-out Ultros backpack that was more grey duct-tape than its original purple canvas. She smiled at the little girl, her ruby eyes bright and lively.

She looked utterly different from the unforgiving spectre of a failed future that he was accustomed to. Nothing like the angry woman he had turned her into.

She caught sight of him before he could make an about-face and exit the situation.

"What's wrong?" she asked quietly once close enough. "I don't normally see you in the mornings."

"Nothing. I just happened to be going this way," he lied.

"Oh." She nodded slowly. "Okay."

"Did you have a family before?" he asked.

Her expression shuttered. He cursed his own lack of tact.

"Yes. No," she said in quick succession. She blinked several times. He felt bad at attacking her with this without warning and outside the known battlegrounds of an empty late-night bar. "They weren't mine, but… they were family."

"I see."

She looked away, out over the ocean. One of the children called to her from the line. She looked back with a strained smile and waved.

"He didn't kill them, before you ask," she said. "Well, actually he did, Denzel died in the third wave of geostigma and Marlene faded away when he figured out how to turn Mako into its gaseous form and hollowed out anyone who breathed it in."

He held back a wince. He didn't know what geostigma referred to, but airborne Mako poisoning? What a horrible way to die. A horrible way to lose someone. A child.

She sucked a breath and then let it out in a slow hiss. "Why aren't I attacking you?"

"Because I promised not to do that."

"Did you?" she asked, her eyebrow raised.

He hadn't before. He decided he would now. "Yes," he said. "I am promising you that."

Her brow lowered as she studied him for a moment.

"Good." She said, finally, with a definitive nod. "Come on." She walked briskly back to the row of trestle tables and he followed. "Tie your hair up, it'll get in the porridge."

"Wait," he said, a ladle suddenly pushed into his hands.

"A scoop each for a small bowl, one and a half for the large. Then hand them over to Barb for some fruit."

A surly boy on the other side of the table held out a cardboard bowl in front of him with both hands.

Sephiroth glared at Tifa. She rewarded him with an angelic smile from the far end of the production line. He wanted his avenging time traveller back.

* * *

They still fought when the mood hit. Generally, they didn't come to blows inside the pub anymore, she had concerns about property damage. It wasn't always over unspeakable crimes against humanity either, sometimes she'd make eye contact with him after the eighteenth person in a row ordered a strawberry daiquiri and he'd know that she would very much appreciate an opportunity to punch him later.

They were more akin to spars now than actual fights, on all but the direst nights. Sometimes he wouldn't draw his sword and return her unarmed blows with his own. The tension changed.

She always got in a couple more hits than he expected and that left him both charged and sated.

Vincent reappeared from where even he had fled to and crashed one of their quieter nights together. Sephiroth had complicated feelings about the man, but they were nothing next to Tifa, who would forget on occasion that it wasn't the Vincent she knew. Then she would clam up into a wounded ball of regret, leaving the two men to carry the conversation.

On a night when he felt very optimistic about the healing state of the world Sephiroth brought Genesis down to the bar and regretted every second of it.

The man had apparently received his miraculous full recovery alongside a spiritual revelation at the foot of a statue of the goddess. That was all well and good, but the years of betrayal and abandonment still stood between them, and accusations spat in the Nibelheim reactor hung heavy in the air.

Tifa appeared at an opportune moment with a fire extinguisher and threw them both out.

But they were trying. They were all trying, and even if it was at a faltering pace, things improved.

She didn't look at him with such burning hatred anymore. It was still there, he just had to dig deeper for it, and found he enjoyed the layers of herself she buried it with just as much.

Somewhere along the way blows they dealt each other turned to exploring touches turned to grasping handholds. He had no idea how touch starved he was until he was holding her. She buried her hands in his hair, so close to his throat, while his fingers worked bruises into her hips. He traced a familiar scar across her chest. It was old and well healed. Wine red eyes looked up at him, hooded and intense.

He woke to her crying. He rolled over and held her close until she fell back asleep.

She had come back for him. He would never forget that.

* * *

It probably shouldn't have been so easy.

Tifa sat on the step of the little bar, enjoying the sunshine. The gil was beginning to stabilise again. Tomorrow she would sell the various treasures and materia she'd tracked down before settling in Junon. Combined with what she'd saved up in the last year she was going to buy the bar. The owner had accepted her lowball offer without even haggling.

She remembered it being much more difficult when she set up Seventh Heaven the first time. She remembered a lot of things being more difficult.

A tremendous yawn split her face. She would have to tell Sephiroth not to come over on Sunday nights, not if he was going to keep her up so late. She wanted to blush and be embarrassed at the assumption that it was an ongoing thing. She hunched up her shoulders and could barely summon up doubt.

They hadn't looked it in the eye, the thing between them, let alone acknowledged it out loud. It was just there. Reliably.

One of the ladies from that morning's breakfast kitchen tooted her horn as she drove past. Tifa waved. It was the highlight of every weekday, feeding the kids. Not least of all because none of them looked back at their parents with fear that maybe if they lost sight of them they would never see them again. When they asked things like 'where's my mum gone?' the answers were typically 'to fetch the car'. They were just hungry. And she had food. It was… nice, for it to be so simple.

Her phone rang.

"Tifa speaking," she said, squinting out over the ocean.

"I have a formal event on soon," Sephiroth said, with no preamble. "I may require… a plus one."

She put a hand over her eyes to block out the sun.

"It's on the 28th if you are free."

"How formal are we talking?" she asked, to avoid the question itself.

"Black tie."

She bit her lip. Of course, he would just come out and ask. Staring down the matter and refusing to dodge. She did pick up on the tentative manner in which he posed the question though.

"Anyone I know going to be there?"

"Do you know the emperor of Wutai?" he asked dryly.

"Oh, yes, is Yuffie going to be there?"

He paused for a long moment. "I hope not."

She squinted up at the sun and received a black spot in the middle of her vision as a reward.

"I've got to think about it. I'll call you back?"

"Alright."

"Bye," she said, and they hung up.

It wasn't that she didn't know exactly what she'd gotten herself into. They were both adults, and she had made her choices willing and with her eyes open.

She huffed a breath and rested her chin on her knuckles.

He was a possessive man whereas she, if she was being honest with herself, quite liked to be needed. He wasn't exactly nice, he was sharp and ruthless. But when she jabbed him he jabbed back and he never ran from her.

They still raged at each other when the mood took a turn. Still spat blunt and hurtful provocations. There were days when black moods took him and she was the woman who had stood between him and whatever absolution Jenova promised. There were days when she felt the scar on her chest and could think only of those who hadn't survived him. Sometimes she remembered she hated him.

Sometimes it was while he was pining her to bed, tearing gasps from her lips. He knew. She saw how he savoured her rage when she bared it to him.

In a quiet little corner of her mind she could admit that even on their worst nights, she tremendously enjoyed his company. She didn't know when that had happened.

She did know, with alarming confidence, that if she called Sephiroth he would pick up the phone.

Her shoulders hunched and she hung her head. That wasn't fair. You couldn't compare one person's reaction to trauma to another's. At the end of the day, she had to manage her own trauma as well.

She thought, approaching the conclusion ever so tentatively, that she might be alright with it. She didn't know if she was allowed to be, and she despised herself a little for it.

She preferred having to convince herself that she was unhappy instead of the other way around. It was refreshing.

The sun was shining. The ocean didn't stink of pollution anymore, Shinra was defanged and Mako production was down sixty percent. The tree on the corner was in full bloom. Someone had grafted a fruit-bearing branch onto it, a joyous rebellion against the Shinra's barren aesthetic. There were ripe tangerines on its branches and rotting into its soil patch.

It could be worse.

She looked down at the contact on her phone, complete with a photo she had taken herself. He had been mid-conversation with Vincent and looked profoundly confused. She smiled at the sight.

She called him back and told him she would be there.

It really was so easy. She embraced it.


	2. Chapter 2

The world was determined to be difficult.

It was the only conclusion Sephiroth could reach as he studied the intelligence leak. Rufus Shinra was going to try and manipulate him by getting at Tifa.

He narrowed his eyes at the unadorned walls of his Junon office and considered his options.

Rufus had escaped the initial wave of arrests on account of not being technically guilty of anything but his birth. He was guilty of a great many other things in subtle, difficult-to-prove ways, but nothing so important that he was worth going after back when Sephiroth's goal had been toppling the corporation as a whole.

In the two years since then, Rufus had retained control of the Turks and weaselled his way out of every charge brought against him. Sephiroth was trying to set up a world that ran according to commonly agreed-upon rules such as 'innocent until proven guilty' and 'right to a fair trial'. He couldn't break those rules so soon after establishing them.

It was supremely vexing.

He had lured Rufus out into bolder and bolder attempts at criminal activity so that justice could be done. Under other circumstances, this would have been perfect.

He reached for his phone and messaged Tifa.

An attempting kidnapping was exactly the evidence he needed. Tifa likely wouldn't even object. But she was a time traveller. His time traveller. For her to take the stand and testify was unacceptable, even more so than the injustices the little Shinra was continuing to get away with.

Very well then. If Rufus wanted to be underhanded about it, he would oblige.

He went about the rest of his day, blinking through a tension headache. He took a call from the Mayor of Corel and ignored one from the Premier of Costa Del Sol. Then he washed his hands of the world for the day and drove down to the bar.

The street was all but abandoned on a Monday night. A delivery vehicle with no license plate idled outside an establishment several doors down, though no workers were in sight to unload it. The wind howled up from the ocean and the nearest streetlight was dead.

The door to Tifa's bar wasn't locked. He pushed it open.

Tifa stood over a seated Reno up at the bar, tending to his broken nose. Rude sat on the floor, trying to massage feeling back into his knee without jostling a clearly broken wrist and ankle.

Both Turks looked at him and froze. Reno's mouth snapping shut mid retort and silence seized upon the room.

"No, leave the ice on," Tifa said, pushing an ice pack back onto his face. She went about her business, utterly unfazed.

Reno cleared his throat, a noisy operation with the bloody state of his face. "You're a mean one, miss."

Sephiroth strolled in, unhurried. Their eyes followed him, Reno's shoulders tensing as he closed the distance. Rude's uninjured hand slid beneath the lapel of his jacket. Sephiroth looked at him. He put his hand back in his lap.

"You attacked me on my night off," Tifa said, "what were you expecting?"

Reno feigned a sigh. "Fine. You owe me a drink though."

Sephiroth sat at the bar behind Reno, watching how his head twitched with the urge to look back at him. Rude hauled himself up to his feet, leaning heavily on the back of a chair.

Sephiroth said nothing and made no move to influence the situation. She wasn't weak and didn't need the help, a point she had made admirably. They would not be goaded by the Turks' antics.

Tifa looked at him over Reno's shoulder and rolled her eyes. Then she snapped Reno's nose back into place and got a yell for her efforts.

"Alright?" she asked when he had stopped fussing, her arms crossed.

"Yeah."

"Good." She smiled far more indulgently than any of them deserved. "Now get out."

They cleared out obediently, supporting each other.

"Reno," Sephiroth said before the could open the door.

The two froze.

"Tell Rufus he'll be seeing me soon."

He gave Sephiroth a terse nod and they left.

Tifa regarded him sidelong when they were alone, stretching her arms out over her head.

"You're early," she said.

He put his arm around her waist, pulling her closer. "I thought you might need help disposing of some bodies."

She hummed playfully. "Maybe next time." She leaned into him and kissed him.

She looked thoughtfully across the room after they parted. One of the chairs sat in a broken heap and the tables were knocked askew, but there was no serious damage. He caught sight of a bruise starting to blossom on her jaw. Nothing about the situation surprised him: not how soundly she trounced them or that she took the time to patch them up afterwards. He traced a finger over the shiny patch of skin, pulsing his cure materia.

"They used to be better fighters," she said quietly.

He shrugged. "You have more experience."

Her wistful smile turned self-satisfied. "I really thought he was going to dodge in time."

He admired how bright and sharp her eyes were.

"You're too kind to those who would hurt you," he said, utterly without shame.

She snorted and declined to take the bait. She looked up at the clock on the wall.

"You are early."

"Should I leave?"

She raised an sceptical eyebrow. "Did you come here without a reason?"

He stood. "Do I need one?"

"You're in a mood," she said, lifting her chin.

She was right. He was. His hands flexed on her waist. It had hounded him all week, a brooding frustration slowly cutting off his air supply.

"Come back to my place," he asked. He wasn't sure if it came out commanding or desperate.

She looked him up and down, her eyes turning inscrutable at whatever she saw. "I have to finish packing away stock. Give me thirty minutes?"

He nodded and they pulled apart. She disappeared back of house and he made himself comfortable at one of the tables. He drew out a notebook and re-annotated the second draft of the peace agreement Corel and Costa Del Sol were debating.

It shouldn't have been his problem, and yet it consistently had been for the last two years. Neither towns, now city-states, had been founded or conquered by Shinra. But a significant number of people who had gotten wealthy off of Shinra and avoided arrest had fled with their millions to their Costa holidays homes and now how the gall to try and play him against Corel in a bid to reclaim power. But the local impoverished populations of both cities genuinely did need help. Food production, supply lines, and monster number were all a mess. They had asked him to help, brandishing their needy at him.

He heard the scrape of Tifa pushing slabs of beer across the floor in the walk-in fridge.

They would reject his amendments to the second draft, just as they did the first. It was a game to them.

Disgust weighed on him.

He could use their rejection against them: plant conditions in it that would reflect poorly on them to turn aside. Trap them in clever wording to wield in future negotiations and shape the political landscape in the long term.

He was struggling to remember why he cared enough to bother. He had only ever wanted to topple Shinra for the things they had done to him.

This was not his mess. They had brought him in for no other reason than to take advantage of him.

The wooden shelves creaked: Tifa lining up new liquor bottles behind the bar.

The two cities were setting up the lines for a fight in which the intended to make him a pawn indefinitely. It would never stop. They were no better than Shinra.

But nobody ever had been. Shinra was not some outside influence: it was only ever humanity, being itself.

He recognised the train of thought within him. He observed it, savoured it for just a moment, and then silenced it.

Dulls thuds from ice bags being thrown into the freezer. She was visible through the open door to the kitchen, pausing in her task to push her hair back from her face.

He could stand up and help. She would reject the offer. Not simply because she didn't need it, but the isolation was intentional. She was gearing herself up to face him.

She looked around, hands on her hips, surveying her territory.

If he let her stew she'd end up jumpier, snappier, and easier to goad. Still determined but vicious to make up for her bubbling old fears.

Whereas if he interrupted, all her defences would go up before her self-doubt could gnaw at them, and she would face him, unyielding. That bone-deep anger that surfaced so rarely these days would stare back at him from her beautiful eyes.

There was an appeal to that. Seeing that terrible knowledge from the only person who knew. But she would also take no bait and make him work harder for any reaction.

He didn't interrupt.

She hauled a box of wine onto the bar and started lining them up next to the glassware. She squared her shoulders and planted her feet squarely. Then slowly she hunched down into herself again. She scowled at nothing and moved faster.

He crossed his ankles, letting his heel drag on the wood. Her head tilted to follow the sound.

He wondered what the delay before they launched into each other down did to him. She probably took it into account when she asked him to wait.

She tucked her head down, tilted slightly towards the arch of her fringe. That usually meant she was keeping something to herself and feeling self-conscious about it. Interesting. He would have to ask her about it later.

Finally, she finished up and reappeared with her bag and coat over her arm.

They didn't say anything on the drive back to his house, their eyes only just grazing each other. A winter storm blew in off the ocean and rain started to tap against the windscreen. Tifa leaned down in her seat to adjust her shoelace. He stared at the road.

She got out her gloves and slowly, carefully pulled them down over her graceful fingers. The armoured leather creaked in the quiet.

Only when they pulled up into his garage did he turn and face her. She looked back, expression determined and simmering with restrained emotion. Excitement. Resentment. Anticipation. Anger.

He heard her heartbeat pick up speed. His did the same.

He opened the door for her. She walked in without hesitation and lead him down to the training room. He followed her silently, unbuckling his sword.

Outside the rain turned torrential, thundering against the reinforced floor to ceiling windows. A flash of lightning illuminated the churning ocean and black sky.

They faced each other in the muffled isolation of the dimly lit room, cut off from the rest of the world. Her stance was deceptively relaxed, but he could see the tension in her neck tendons and how lightly she stood, ready to leap back at any moment. He stood at ease, knowing how much it would irritate her.

She scowled at him. He waited.

She struck first, immediately closing the distance between them, fists flying. He blocked. She struck again, again, and again. They traded blows, and his blood ignited. Her eyes were bright in the dark. Her fist grazed his cheekbone.

He swept her feet out from under her. She caught herself and rolled away. He pressed his advantage, stalking after her.

She ducked, weaved, retreated, then launched forward. She grabbed the lapels of his coat and used his momentum to hurl him across the room. He flipped and landed on his feet, tossing the coat off.

She flew after him, a kick aimed at his head. He ducked and grabbed her raised leg, holding it up. He knocked the other one out from under her. She held herself up by his grip on her and kicked him in the head. He dropped her.

She flipped to kick him under the chin, but he threw himself back before it could connect. He launched forward again just as she landed on her feet.

He caught her by the throat and slammed her against the window. Snarling, she locked her legs around his waist and grabbed at his head, yanking him forward to smash his face against the glass. He caught himself just before impact. She struggled to throw him off with her legs alone, but he was much stronger than her.

"You needn't try so hard, Tifa," he whispered into her ear. "You know you prefer it when I win."

"Fuck you, Sephiroth," she hissed.

He leaned against her, trapped her between his body and the glass. Her breath stuttered at the contact and it took effort to stop his from doing the same. He took her hand from his hair and braced it against the window over her head.

"Tell me to stop then. Kick me off." His hand caressing her throat. Her body burned against his. His heart thundered in his ribcage.

"Tell me," he said, kissing the soft spot under her ear that made her whimper, "that you don't want me."

She twitched her hips, and growled at him. "No."

He covered her lips with his own. She surged up into him.

She was shirtless and his trousers were open by the time he flipped her around, holding her to him with his arm around her waist.

The dark glass reflected the image back at them, superimposed over the storm. His other hand was slick and curling in time to her panting breath. Her head leaned back on his shoulder. Her legs, firmly planted to hold herself against him, started to tremble.

He traced the scar down her chest, from collarbone to waist. The cacophony of emotions it always brought out in him surged: possession, protectiveness, shame, jealousy, pride. It all swirled in a heady cocktail he didn't want to face under any circumstance but when she was making soft noises in his arms.

Her hooded eyes met his in the reflection, a mess of accusation and gratitude, fury and yearning. So strong, so precious. Something infinitely tender replaced the mess of darker emotions within him. She turned her head enough to kiss him.

He doubted he would ever tell her he loved her, but he did. Planet, he did. She came apart under his hands.

He pulled her down to lie on the mats and rose over her.

"I want to be on top," she murmured, wrapping her legs around him to try for a flip.

"Then you should have fought harder," he said with a smirk, lifting her hips up to meet him.

Her responding laugh turned into a moan.

* * *

Sometime later Tifa leaned her forehead against his. She could feel the racing beat of his heart against her chest. He was breathing hard, his eyes still closed. The slight glow of them reflected on his cheeks. She sat astride him on the bed and felt very proud of herself.

She remembered what day it was and wondered what right she had to be here. She breathed out and pecked his lips. She was here. Right or not.

Sephiroth groaned and chased her lips.

"What is it?" he asked.

"What?"

"Whatever it is you're being quiet about."

She looked away. He massaged her thighs and waited out her silence. Her knees were going to start complaining about the stress she had put them under soon.

"It's the anniversary of the day the plate fell," she whispered. They were still forehead to forehead, shrouded behind sweat-slicked fringes, but she didn't meet his eye. "Will fall. Would have fallen. Two years from now."

"The plate fell? Separate from the meteor?"

"This was earlier, and just sector 7. We'd blown up a reactor and Shinra knew we were hiding somewhere in the sector, but… they didn't know where."

"It fell," he asked, his voice low, "or it was dropped?"

"Dropped." She met his glowing eyes. "Reno set the explosives and beat us to a pulp when we tried to stop him."

His hands kept squeezing her thighs, but he offered her no words of comfort. No absolution. It made her feel a little better.

"I forgot," she said, wearing a weak, guilty smile. She shook her head at herself. "I fought those two and it didn't even occur to me what day it was until they were gone."

"What happened next? After the drop?"

"We got caught." She leaned her head back, looking to the ceiling. "We were locked up in the Shinra tower waiting to be interrogated and executed until… _he_ came back."

His hands grew still on her thighs.

Her eyes dropped to his. She waited for him to ask.

He didn't ask.

He kissed her neck, and the subject died. She kissed his temple then pushed him to lie down.

Sometimes honesty was facing the things that hurt. Sometimes it was knowing what not to trust yourself with. They curled around each other, and went to sleep.

* * *

Tifa woke first.

She crawled out of the warmth of the bed, grudgingly, and went and brewed a pot of coffee. She knew he woke with her movement, but he stayed in bed in what was now a comfortable tradition of the-morning-after alone time.

She sat on a little window seat overlooking the city and enjoyed the quiet. The storm had spent its vehemence in the night but it would be a dreary day of intermittent rain. The sun had risen but even if it breached the clouds it wouldn't reach down into the west-facing slope of the city for another hour. The grey clouds were touched with just a hint of gold.

With her knees pulled up to her chest and coffee steaming in her hands, she sighed in contentment.

The first time she had stayed over the sunrise had been interrupt by the shadow of the canon. It had since been decommissioned and taken down. It was still a military city, the SOLDER base remained and the airfield hadn't seen any drop in activity.

Sephiroth led the increasingly small armed forces, but he was more an untethered ambassador to everywhere from everywhere. When he was irritating her she liked to accuse him of being a politician. He spent large chunks of the year travelling, months at a time off doing thankless work with unpleasant company. But he hadn't stopped being a military leader. SOLDIER couldn't be easily disbanded, not with the medical complications intrinsic to the rank and many wouldn't leave even when Sephiroth offered.

Those who had left, a tremendous number given the sheer size of Shinra's military, were offered parcels of land. Shinra had owned so much and left it unused, especially on the eastern continent. Now it gave homes and employment to the disenfranchised and helped the global movement of land reclaim: trying to nurse Mako wastelands back into arable land again. The planet's recovery was slow but ongoing.

She looked out at the view, tiers of houses marching down into the water, all damp and soggy and grey. She struggled to think of it as her world sometimes. It was so Other to her, it had changed in ways she didn't really understand. The populations were so flabbergasted over things like the non-violent fall of Shinra and the sudden abandonment of Mako Power. Many looked at Sephiroth with a sense of betrayal. She tried not to resent them for the luxury of thinking this was what betrayal looked like.

The price of fixing it before it was irrevocably broken, she supposed. Nobody else had to know how high the stakes were. That was alright.

She stretched out her legs and leaned forward to touch her toes. It had been an intense night.

She smiled, drained the last of the mug, and went and had a shower.

He had risen by the time she got out and they swapped places. They shared a comfortable breakfast together before going their separate ways for the day. The burdened intensity in his eyes had quietened from the previous night, she was glad to see.

It came and went over the next couple of months.

The Western Continent peace talks dragged on, and dragged Sephiroth further in every step of the way. She saw the gridlocked process on the news and talked about it with him over the phone. She knew many of the major players, even if they were very different people now.

Costa del Sol pushed for more and more and more. Their well-paid militia was purely for defensive purposes, they said, and if people didn't like them patrolling the edges of Corel's territory, well, that wasn't their problem. She was biased, Barrett was one of Corel's negotiators, but it all struck her as very Shinra of them.

She turned on the TV in the bar one day at a customer's request and saw Sephiroth and fire.

Costa's barracks and one of the wealthiest suburbs, all largely empty at the time of ignition according to the newsfeed scrolling the bottom of the screen, wreathed in flames.

There were gasps and gossip and conjecture throughout the room, staff and patrons claiming shock or lack thereof.

She watched, nailed to the spot. The footage looped. Filmed at a distance and blurry from the heat, he walked patiently through the field of fire, uncaring for who saw. Silver hair and black leather floated unharmed in the waves of heat.

She had forgotten how bone-chilling it was.

She looked down at her hands. She'd unthinkingly put her gloves on.

The footage was hours old, no longer breaking news but a matter of discussion amid the newscasters. She didn't listen to any of it.

She patted her bar manager on the shoulder and in a numb haze marched into the wine cellar and called him.

He picked up on the second ring.

"Are you going to end the world?" she asked, and it all felt so surreal that her voice came out detached and curious.

He paused long enough she couldn't tell if he was shocked at the question or deliberating over the answer.

"No."

She closed her eyes and took in a big gulp of air. "Okay."

She hung up.

Her hands shook. She stood in the cellar long enough that her staff came and checked on her. She told them to hold down the fort for the evening and she made for the city limits. She past the walls, past the tame lands, and into the monster-ridden wilderness where she could fight something. It was a long enough walk for the shock to wear off, and she had to contend with her reaction to the situation. Her gloves creaked against the knuckles of her clenched fists.

Her phone rang. She didn't look at the ID because she knew who it was and if she looked she might not answer.

"Can I see you tonight?" Sephiroth asked. His tone gave away very little.

She breathed in slowly and did her own deliberation. She let the breath back out.

"Yes."

"Where are you?"

"In the grasslands. Past the cliffs."

It was his turn to hang up on her.

A group of Capparwires had snuck up on her. She blocked their opening attack, then unleashed herself upon them.

* * *

He looked calm and collected when he found her, still fighting her way through monsters. He stood on the side of the beaten-down battleground and watched her without comment.

She dodged a strike and retaliated with a flurry of blows, trying not to let him distract her.

Two timelines worth of competing instincts yelled at her about his presence, telling her to ignore the low levelled monsters and go punch him instead, to give him a hug, to run away and get back up, to go stare into his eyes. She ignored it all. She kept tearing through her targets.

The last monster fell.

"You know," she said, looking around for more monster to fight. "If you'd just ignored me from the beginning and did everything Jenova wanted, it wouldn't have hurt me. I was used to that then. Numb to it." She resolutely didn't look at him, but she still caught the way his head moved to watch her in her peripheral vision. "Even seeing Nibelheim burn again… I would have just left to rally people to stop you."

"And now?" he asked, his voice quiet.

"Now… I'd miss you." There was nothing to fight. She lowered her fists and her shoulders sank. "Hating you didn't use to hurt."

"Do you hate me?"

She looked resolutely at the dirt. "Yes."

"You promised to never lie to me, Tifa," he reminded her gently.

"No. I don't." She looked up at him. "That hurts too."

He looked about as lost as she felt.

"What I did in Costa was a strategic decision, not an emotionally driven one," he said.

"So was ending the world." She looked at the stack of dead monsters she had taken her emotions out on. "I've never known you to do anything that wasn't a strategic decision."

"Loving you wasn't."

Her head snapped back to him. He was looking at the monsters now.

"Turning on humanity does not benefit me or anyone I care about," he said. "Depriving Costa's wealthy of a constant supply of mercenaries with which to threaten the western continent does."

She stared at him. "Do you?"

"Yes."

They finally stopped dodging eye contact. She felt anew the stab of vulnerability of how much it would hurt if he really did turn on her now. How utterly unprepared she was to let go of him let alone face him in any serious manner. She saw the same devastating vulnerability in his eyes.

She closed the distance between them. She leaned her head on his chest. He put his arms around her.

"I'm sorry I freaked out."

"I understand," he said.

"Is there going to be a war with Costa?"

"Now there won't be."

She nodded. "You smell like ash."

"It's my hair." She knew. She remembered it catching in her own. She looked up at him.

"I love you," she said. "Please don't leave me."

He held her closer and cradled the back of her neck in a crushing hug.

"I won't."

After a time they headed back to the city. They walked easier than they had on the trek out, both a little less tight around the eyes.

Monsters ambushed them, they ended them soundly. It was nothing grand or dramatic, just a quiet sharing of something that softened the blow of declarations said out loud. When they stood outside the city gates, he pulled her close and they shared breath for a long moment.

He would fly back to the Western continent again that night but intended to return by the next weekend. Somehow it managed to feel normal. They agreed on their plans and then re-entered the city together, committed to their lives and the choices they had made.

* * *

_A/N: Thank you for reading! Reviews are always welcome._


	3. Chapter 3

Sephiroth looked up from his computer, distracted by the sound of the bedroom door opening.

Ah, Tifa was awake.

It was mid morning on a Monday and he was trading unnecessarily sarcastic emails with Genesis over the decommissioning of the Midgar plate. Timid sunlight broke through the clouds from time to time to drape across the airy living room. The high coastal winds made the potted palm trees rustle and slap against the windows, but inside it was peaceful, and just about time for a second cup of coffee.

Tifa drifted down the stairs, scrubbing a hand down her face and wearing a loose robe over the shorts and singlet she slept in. Sephiroth smiled at the sight. She worked late on weekends and, in his opinion, didn't sleep enough to make up for it.

"Good morning," he said. He leaned back in his chair and hugged her waist as she hugged his upper half and kissed the top of his head. "How did you sleep?"

"Mmm morning. And good," she replied, yawning. "You? How's…" she wiggled her fingers at his screen.

"Genesis is being difficult. Reeve wants me to deal with it."

She laughed. "Reeve wants a lot of things."

She grabbed his empty coffee cup and disappeared into the kitchen. She came back a few minutes later with two steaming cups and a plate of toast for herself. She curled up on the couch and flipped through the catalogue for her liquor suppliers.

They had been together for roughly four years now, Shinra's having been toppled for five, and the two had long since found a comfortable equilibrium together. Co-habitating was still a recent development though, one that both had been nervous about. Then they finally moved in together and their worries turned out to have been redundant. They kept a bed in the spare room for whenever one of them suddenly found physical contact abhorrent or just wanted to toss and turn through their nightmares in peace, but it had been used far less than he expected. Tifa overlooked his habit of eating directly over the sink and he refrained from pointing out the abandoned pairs of earrings she left everywhere. They did argue over the correct way to load the dishwasher.

They rarely argued over things that happened in a different timeline now. Not that either had forgotten, but as time passed it just didn't come up very often.

He watched her stretch forward to touch her toes before launching into her morning stretch routine, her eyes half closed.

"Does the name 'Deepground' mean anything to you?" he asked.

Her eyes snapped open.

"It shouldn't exist yet. It wasn't founded until-" she stopped. "What have you found?" She unfolded from her stretching position and turned to face him.

He frowned. "Just old financial reports. We're sifting through Shinra's building records from the plate's construction, but there was no more information attached, other than Hojo's name."

"I didn't think it was that old. None of the records we found said..." She put a hand over her mouth. She looked away and swore.

He stood up. "What is it? What is Deepground?"

She told him.

He leaned forward on the bench, his head bowed.

"Is there no end to it?" he asked.

She scowled at nothing. "Apparently not. What will you do?"

"The same as every other lab we've found. I'll have to go in and clear it out. Open it to the sky."

"It was massive, Sephiroth." She sighed. "Bigger than the one in the Shinra building, it stretched for miles, buried under the city. Assuming Hojo had time to move in there before Shinra's end?"

"I don't know. I'll tell Vincent and the others, we need to move quickly."

He gripped his temples, thinking through all he would need to do. Tifa picked up her now empty coffee cup and stood listlessly in the middle of the living room, her robe slipped down from one shoulder.

"It would be easier if you came with us," he said, quietly.

Her fingers tightened on the cup. "Easier?"

"You have the benefit of hindsight." She hadn't volunteered her knowledge of the future for anyone besides him, and he preferred it that way. She'd saved the world enough times, she was _ his _time traveler and the rest of the world couldn't have her. That had been an easier position to defend when they both thought the rest of her knowledge of the future was obsolete.

"I wouldn't have thought to look under the city itself. You know what they were hiding and where. Which records are false."

The skin around her eyes tightened. "I don't want to go to Midgar."

"I know."

"I already dug up Deepground once. It was hard enough the first time."

He nodded. She scowled at the ground.

"Please."

She sighed. "Fine."

* * *

Tifa didn't recognise Midgar.

It was still standing, for one. That was good. She should be proud of that: it's survival was a testament to her success, which was a very Sephiroth spin on it.

They flew from Junon in a tiny airship, and as they broke through the clouds the first thing she saw was blocky fields of shiny solar panels. They stretched for miles along the plains, while in wandering ranks along the cliff tops perched towering wind turbines.

The rotting pizza was no more. All but three sectors of the plate had been decommissioned, sector by sector, although the scaffoldings and redundant pillars still stood. The outer walls had been torn down and new suburbs sprawled beyond its limits, far beyond where Edge would never be.

The city didn't glow anymore either. All but one of the reactors had been decommissioned, and that one was working at its lowest output, never firing noxious green discharge into the air.

It wasn't pretty. Steel and concrete still dominated the landscape, but hints of greenery slunk back in. Not much, the tree planting initiative in the plains struggled, but there were parks visible from the air.

Tifa stared out the window, one hand on the glass. She hadn't expected it to look so different. The Shinra tower remained, proud and ugly like she hadn't seen since Diamond weapon. The damage the city hadn't taken was somehow just as shocking as the growth.

Behind her Sephiroth sat relaxed with his arms crossed. He saw it all the time. He was responsible for a significant portion of it.

"You did a good job," she said. "Fixed it up real nice."

He put a gentle hand on her back. "I wasn't fighting someone trying to destroy the planet every step of the way."

"Yeah, well. You probably would have figured it out even if you had been."

"Feeling sorry for yourself, Tifa?" he asked, not unkindly.

She cracked a smile. "Maybe a little." She sobered a second later as the airship circled over the city proper. "Do we _ have _to go in through sector 7?"

"It's the most stable entrance. Vincent and Genesis will meet us there."

It was one of the sectors that had been opened first, that slice of the pizza removed. The sunlight reached down between the plates on either side. It must have been like living at the bottom of a well.

Tifa let out a shaky breath. Sephiroth's hand on her back was a steadying comfort.

They landed on the outskirts and drove in towards the deactivated Reactor 0 beneath the Shinra building. Tifa had tried not to stare out the windows too much but couldn't help herself. It was all so different, and yet not different at all, playing tricks on her memories. There were paved roads bathed in sunlight, real sunlight. They followed the layout of the slums but they weren't really slums at all anymore. The majority of the shacks of corrugated iron, scraps and tarpaulins were gone and more stable buildings stood in their place.

A knot formed in her stomach and her hands formed into useless fists. Sephiroth silently drove them closer and closer to the cluster of streets she had once known so well. Maybe it wouldn't be there. Maybe it had all been wiped away and replaced with some new restaurant good enough for this sunny modern world.

It was all wrong. It felt the same as the false Nibelheim village that Shinra rebuilt. An imposter smiling in place of a terrible tragedy.

Only it wasn't an imposter. It was the real thing, finally allowed to thrive. Did that make her the imposter?

Sephiroth took a corner and there it was, Seventh Heaven, standing like a beacon. She put a hand on his arm, not looking back. He pulled over without question.

She stared at it. It hadn't kept pace with the neighbourhood's rejuvenation, the old bar showing its years in discoloured weatherboards and rain streaked awnings. Ghosts haunted it in her mind's eye, replacing the morning sun with eternal grimy night. Somewhere Marlene laughed and called for her daddy. Somewhere Cloud was pretending to be a mercenary in a SOLDIER's uniform.

"Do you want to go in?" Sephiroth asked.

She swallowed. "We'll be late."

"We have time."

She wrestled her eyes away, staring down at the road before them instead. She'd promised herself they wouldn't get side tracked, they would go in, excavate Deepground, and then go home. She'd been kidding herself. She bowed her head.

"We've come all this way. I don't think I'd forgive myself if I hid in the car."

"Do you need a little time?" Sephiroth asked.

A strangled laugh burst from her. She clapped a hand over her mouth.

"No." Goddess, it was all so absurd. She'd never said goodbye to this place last time, it had just been torn from her unceremoniously. She pulled herself up and shook her head. "No. I've had enough time. Let's go face our problems."

She opened the door and stepped out.

There was a scraggly flowering weed sticking out of concrete. She smiled at it, then braced herself and looked up again.

It wasn't Seventh Heaven. It couldn't be, in a world where both Corel and Nibelheim were still standing. It was still the failing nautical themed joint it had been before her and Barret took it over.

_ The Floating Anchor, _ the sign proudly proclaimed it, in blue and white. The little sign above it still said 'Have a Great Day!' with pleasant optimism though.

"Why would an anchor float?" Sephiroth asked at her side, with the voice he used when he thought something was stupid but didn't want to risk being rude.

A very slight smile tugged at her face. "It is a terrible name."

She hauled in a breath, prepared for an emotional onslaught, and climbed the stairs. She pushed the heavy wooden door open and stepped inside.

It didn't hurt nearly as much as she thought it would.

A bored waiter showed them to a table where they sat on barrels. Dusty little lifesavers on a stick declared they were sitting at table 3. Sephiroth stood to fetch them water.

Tifa looked around skeptically. She leafed through the menu in front of her.

"Why do they have a million menu items?" she asked under her breath. "No way they have so many types of steak on hand, not when they're this quiet." No wonder the place wasn't doing well.

She'd made the same mistakes once. In the early days Seventh Heaven had been poorly run and poorly laid out by people who didn't really know what they were doing. Whose focus was on the pain they had endured and the revenge they wanted for it. It was a coping strategy first and a bar second.

She looked around the haphazard place, neglected and dusty.

She had grown beyond it.

It was a curious realisation. Something old and mangled inside of her readjusted itself slightly.

Sephiroth looked uncomfortable and the few other patrons stared at him. It wasn't how she remembered it.

The waiter disappeared into the smoko room they had turned into Avalanche's secret headquarters behind the jukebox, a cigarette already in hand. Tifa smiled. She had forgotten how badly it stank of smoke down there. It was part of why Cid had felt like a good fit despite being so obnoxious: he smelled like rebellion.

Sephiroth returned with two water glasses, silver hair and black streaming behind him, and looking wildly out of place. He sat opposite her at the table where Jesse, Biggs, and Wedge used to play cards. It was the weirdest thing she'd seen since coming back in time.

There was no reconciling the rage of her younger self, to whom Nibelheim was the worst thing that could happen, her shame at how it ended, and the numbing scar that time scabbed it all over with. She felt like such a jumbled mess, she may as well have _ Sephiroth _saunter through this place that couldn't exist, largely sane and providing her with emotional support.

She snorted a laugh. What else could she do?

"Let's get out of here," she said.

Sephiroth nodded, and they got back up and headed out into the sun.

She felt lighter as she got back into the car, marginally more at peace.

He drove them up to the entrance to Deepground.

There was no more peace to be had that day.

* * *

Sephiroth led the descent into Deepground.

The tunnels leading into it were labyrinthine and dangerous, with rusted old security checkpoints and automated defences that were certainly not company approved. He cut through them.

The pipes of the giant, aging reactor groaned and dripped around them. The air stank of rust and stagnant Mako.

Genesis walked behind him, then came Tifa, wearing a gas mask and whispering directions, and Vincent brought up the rear.

He was certain that the other two had figured out what she was by now, but it was never discussed. Genesis had seen the younger, mountain guide version and gave the two of them narrow eyed looks from time to time. Whatever he thought he knew, he was smart enough to never bring it up and misdirected when other parties asked prying questions.

Vincent he suspected knew with more certainty, as Tifa had tentatively found a friend in him again. One of the few details she confided in Sephiroth of the disastrous final years of the other future was that Vincent lasted longer than all her other friends and comrades. They had supported each other as the world burned. She never discussed whether the mechanism of time travel had unmade her last friends or if she simply left them behind, alone, on a dying planet.

She knew the answer, and given the chasm that never quite closed between them, so did Vincent.

The group spoke quietly as they walked. The site had been forgotten for so long there wasn't much risk of finding any specimes still alive, but monsters bred in reactors left unattended.

At last they found the entrance.

They unsealed the forgotten city, and all fell silent.

It was, in all respects, everything he expected of one of Hojo's labs, just the most extreme version. None of them had the luxury of being shocked, but it had been a long time since a new lab had been discovered and they'd had to deal with Shinra's sins.

It was ugly and painful.

Sephiroth ended up working with Genesis as they combed through records, Mako tanks, and specimens cages. Their friendship was a bruised and scarred old thing, but they worked well together when it mattered. Methodical and numb, they waded through the horrors.

The specimens had been left to rot in Mako solutions and strung up on various apparatuses. All had been left exactly as they were when he tore down Shinra five years ago.

So few of Shinra's crimes surprised him. He was intimately acquainted with many of them before he even knew they were illegal. He had a high tolerance level, but it had been some time. He had thought the years of distance and peace had brought some acceptance. He had thought they had purged this.

Some of the specimens were still alive. Tifa knew some of their names. They did what they could for them. Most had turned mad and monstrous and could not be passively subdued. He blinked dispassionately and got the job done. It took weeks.

The new Midgar government didn't condone executions, he recalled as they dug and dug through the massive lab. Ex-President Shinra had written a best selling tell-all memoir from house arrest. Hojo was sitting comfortably in a cell out in the countryside, and publishing revolutionary biology and chemistry papers just to pass the time. The injustice burned at him.

The others took breaks. He kept on ploughing through, determined to get it done.

Finally Tifa hauled him away and shoved food into his hands. He didn't want to go back while work remained, forgotten abominations forgotten still in their tanks of Mako solution. Tifa wasn't having it.

The sky was dark when he stepped out of the reactor.

They came back the next day and did it all again.

* * *

In the middle of the night, Tifa woke up.

She looked over her shoulder.

Sephiroth sat in silence on the end of the bed.

She pulled herself to sit up, blinking in the dark.

They were a week into the excavation and staying in Sephiroth's spartan Midgar apartment. She had slept like the dead and dreamed of a dead world since arriving in the city. Sephiroth barely slept at all but he cared enough to go along with her insistence that he try.

She rubbed her eyes and shuffled closer. His back was straight and he stared at the blank wall directly ahead of him. She wasn't sure how close to get, it might have been one of those nights when he didn't want to be touched. She wasn't about to leave him alone though.

She turned and sat with her back lightly pressed against his. His skin was warm through her night shirt.

He didn't move. She pulled her knees up to her chest and rested her chin on them.

"Do you think I'm a monster?" he asked.

"No."

"I had to be put down in another life," he said, voice devoid of any emotion.

"There's nothing wrong with you. What was done _ to _ you was monstrous." She looked over her shoulder.

He bowed his head. "I am what was done to me."

"No, you're not."

"Then why are you afraid of me?" he asked quietly.

She scowled. "I am not."

He turned his head enough to give her a sceptical look she had always despised.

She turned herself around and wrapped an arm around his middle, ignoring the slight flinch, and putting her mouth by his ear.

"I wouldn't be in your bed if I was afraid of you."

He turned in her arms and loomed over her, forcing her to fall onto her back on the bed.

"Wouldn't you, Tifa?" he asked, because he was a masochist and always wanted to uncover all the worst possible truths to stab himself with. She wasn't going to have it.

She wrapped her legs around him and flipped him over. He cradled the back of her head as she did so.

"You were hurt," she said, her hands on either side of his head on the bed. Glowing green eyes looked up at her in the dark. "You were used by heartless monsters who don't care about anything but themselves, you did what you had to to survive. None of that makes you a monster." She wanted to hug him, to do something to show him how much she cared, but wasn't sure what would help.

Instead she rolled back off of him. He didn't like to be smothered and she didn't want to be telling him how to feel.

He chased her, mutely picking her up and putting her in his lap as he sat up. She put her arms around his waist and leaned her head against his shoulder.

Taut, intimate silence blanketed them. His hands flexed against her shoulder.

"Did the other Sephiroth get to kill Hojo?" he asked, eventually.

She shook her head. "Vincent did it." She looked up at him. He was staring at the wall again. "He did kill the president though."

He nodded slowly. He let out a deep breath.

"I am filled with hatred, Tifa," he rasped, helpless. "I thought I'd dealt with it, but it's still there, as strong as it always was. I can't dig it out of me."

Her grip on him tightened.

"I want to see them burn. I _ want _to be the monster they made me into, because why should they be spared the consequences?"

"I… I don't know," she whispered.

"Don't you?" he replied. It sounded like both a plea and a challenge. "You're invested in my not being a monster."

She bowed her head. She had chased down her own revenge regardless of the cost. She'd never come to terms with whether or not she should have.

"When I saw the president speared to his desk by Masamune…" she admitted into the dark, "...I was glad."

Glowing green eyes finally fixed on her. "Were you?"

"I didn't blow up reactors because I cared about the planet. Not really. I just hated Shinra."

"Why did you stop?"

"Because it didn't do anything. They just deflected and everyone else paid the price." She shrugged and looked away. She was caught in a curtain of silver hair and strong arms. It had turned comforting somewhere along the way. "I don't know how to stop being angry either. But I… I'm not going to destroy myself for them. I won't give them the satisfaction."

"You give me the satisfaction," he said, his voice low.

"That's different."

"Is it?" He put a hand on jaw and guided her back to look at him. His eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep but as hyper-focused as always. "How can you let me do the things I do to you?"

she swallowed. "Some days are easier than others."

He ran a hand back through her hair, holding her head still in his grasp. She felt the cold pit of anger and hatred deep inside of her, exactly where she last left it. He searched her face for it.

"I've killed you so many times," she said.

"How did it feel?"

"Good, the first time. You went down hard."

"And after that?"

"Diminishing returns. I didn't feel any less hateful when you were gone."

He pulled her to himself in a hard embrace and buried his head in her neck. She held him just as tight, burying one hand in his hair and the other splayed across his wing-less back.

"How do you live with yourself?" he asked into her ear.

"What else am I supposed to do?" she hissed back. She pushed him back enough to look in his eyes again. "Aren't we allowed to feel our own anger? To grieve? Aren't we allowed to be happy?"

"'Allowed?'" He was quiet for a long time, searching her eyes for she didn't know what.

"No. We don't need permission," he said in a voice she had last heard declaring Gaia to be his.

He held her close and rolled them over back into the bed. They held each other until the dawn.

* * *

A/N: Thank you for reading! Reviews are always welcome.


End file.
